The Real Inside Story

In the early 1960s, De Forest turned from making scrap metal constructions and abstract paintings to works in which animals, totemic images, and fantastical beings engage us with storytelling and game playing. In The Real Inside Story, cutaway walls conflate inside and outside worlds, and animals and humans seem both toylike and symbolic. De Forest called art “one of the last strongholds of magic” and described his richly colored and textured fantasy worlds as “unknowable [though] hauntingly familiar.”